Facebook just bought the messaging service WhatsApp for $19 billion, or 19 Instagrams. What does that even look like? To grasp how crazily big this acquisition is, it helps to break it out. Everything you're about to see is to scale.

Snapchat turned down Facebook's offer, but it's a good frame of reference for what comes next.

Update: Originally, this post was written so that the radius of the circle was proportional to acquisition value. We modified it so that the area of each circle was proportional to acquisition value.

Brian Fung covers technology for The Washington Post, focusing on telecom, broadband and digital politics. Before joining the Post, he was the technology correspondent for National Journal and an associate editor at the Atlantic.

Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.

To pause and restart automatic updates, click "Live" or "Paused". If paused, you'll be notified of the number of additional comments that have come in.

Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.